


Alchemy

by tree



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Squeeze, UST, post-episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-26
Updated: 2006-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-02 07:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tree/pseuds/tree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alchemy (noun) figurative: a process by which paradoxical results are achieved or incompatible elements combined with no obvious rational explanation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alchemy

> The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. --Carl Jung

The quality of silence late at night is different from other silences he's known. It is crisper, larger; all hush and echo. Sound travels more readily, satellite images are clearer. He imagines telepathy might also be easier at night, possibly psychokinesis. Anything requiring clarity, really, and distance. But the stillness has an underwater feeling, too, the press of liquid and held breath.

Mulder moves away from the window, past the soft light of the fish tank. The room is lit by its blue glow and the streetlights outside. Arms folded across his chest, the bump of his heart is an odd experience, half heard, half felt. He thinks the sound of his blood moving would be like the ocean. If only his body was a shell he could press his ear against - the vibrations a little bit hollow, somehow inside out.

"I'm not a part of any agenda. You've got to trust me." Her voice echoes in his head sometimes like that. Maybe memory is a sort of telepathy. Maybe he's just crazy. She said that to him once, but she was laughing at the time. He liked it.

He likes her. And he doesn't want to.

Dana Scully is a conundrum. She refuses to remain within any of the definitions he's applied to her. She keeps connoting. Hell, she's rewriting them. His dictionary can't keep up.

The television is switched off but he's staring at it. In the refracted light from outside he can see his legs reflected indistinctly. For a moment he watches himself move in that other surface as though under a thin skein of water. He wants to be that other self, the one made of light on the screen. To be full of purpose and focussed again.

And he is. Pushing a hand through his hair, he is.

It's just the way she argues with him privately but defends him publicly. That asshole Tom Colton who obviously wanted more from her than just help with a case. He'll probably be an AD in a few years but she'll still be worth two of him. More.

He's pacing now, measured treads. The floor is cool under his bare feet. Of their own accord, his legs set up a rhythm from the door to the desk, from the desk to the door.

The way she saved him in Idaho. When was the last time anybody saved him from anything? He had been too muddled from the drugs in his system to take it in at the time, but looking back he is awed by her loyalty, her audacity. For him. He cannot reconcile it.

And their first case. How she came to him in fear and trusted him to tell her the truth. Her own honesty is frightening. He does not think about the way she looked in her underwear.

But now he's saved her too, so they're even.

Still, the sight of her tonight, hair mussed, shirt unbuttoned, panting with exertion; he can't get it out of his head. He hadn't known how erotic courage could be. He hadn't thought about her being beautiful.

That stops him short, mid-step. He sits, instead. The air feels as though it's lapping at his skin.

Earlier, after Tooms had been taken into custody, he'd tried to apologise for breaking down her door. She had eyed him for a moment in that way she has, that way he's fast coming to enjoy, and then smiled.

"Mulder, you have my permission to break down my door any time I'm being attacked by a liver-eating mutant." She'd paused for a moment and then added, "Or any sort of mutant, for that matter."

"So you allow for the possibility of future mutants, Scully?" Why does he like teasing her so much?

It was hours ago now and he's still sitting on his sofa thinking about her. She will have the chain on the door and her firearm on the bedside table. She had refused his suggestions to stay with someone for the night, simply asking him wearily, "And how would I explain this, Mulder?" He'd even offered to stay with her instead. In response she'd all but pushed him out the door.

"The chain is fine. I'm armed, it'll do for one night." Her tone was firm. He hadn't really wanted to stay anyway.

He switches on the television, but leaves it muted. The flickering light casts deeper blue shadows on the walls, he could almost be swimming. Perhaps this is what it's like to be a fish.

Rubbing absently at his belly, he takes a deep breath and exhales, repeats himself. At odd moments his hand remembers the warm softness of her back above her cotton underwear. If he closes his eyes, his memory supplies the stunning vision of Scully in her bathroom: eyes wide, breathing arrhythmic, skin flushed.

At the time he'd been terrified, but now his hand and his memory conspire against him. This is how she'd look, something in him whispers, coaxing. Supplying sensory information to fill the gaps. Above him, underneath him, soft and warm and strong. Her laughter, then, his name in her voice, all the meaning she can already fill into those two syllables.

His name coming out of her mouth with her pale skin flushed pink and her shirt unbuttoned and the soft swell of her hips in his hands.

Christ, what is he doing? He lurches up from the sofa to the kitchen and gulps down some water, willing away his erection.

"No." His voice is rough and startlingly in the quiet. It staggers drunkenly into the air, breaking things.

He rolls the cool glass against his forehead. Takes a few more deep breaths, concentrating on the twin actions of inhale, exhale. No.

He remembers why he does not trust her. Should not. Will not. Suddenly he's angry. At her guilelessness, her logic, her graceless suits. He's angry that he notices her mouth, and the way his office feels different when she's in it. The way he feels different. Most of all he's angry at the way she listens to him. How dare she listen to him? How dare she not just dismiss him like so many others have for so long? How dare she make him feel this real?

Rubbing his temples, Mulder wanders back into his living room, his feet confident in the near-dark.

It's late and he's tired and he is self-aware enough to know that it's not Scully he's angry with. The knowledge doesn't make him feel any better.

If he believes in the theory that there are five stages of grief, then he is assuredly at stage two. He has moved past shock and denial with   
remarkable speed. The idea of bargaining seems a long way off. So he's trapped in anger. Oh, Samantha.

The physiological indicators of fear, anger and desire are remarkably similar. It's no wonder he's riding these strange emotional waves.

Tonight he'd been frightened. The images of what he'd find at Scully's apartment if he wasn't in time choked him through the long ride to get to her, the breath backing up in his lungs like he was drowning. He doesn't want to care so much. Just enough. Just enough and no more.

But she's alive, he reminds himself. His head rolls along the back of the sofa to his right. Backlit in blue, the fish meander slowly around the tank. She's alive.

The phone rings, pulling him from the underwater world he inhabits. For a moment, he just looks at it. It keeps ringing so he picks it up.

"Mulder." His voice is slightly hoarse and he clears his throat.

"Mulder, did I wake you?"

Everything he's felt tonight rushes through him in a startling rainbow of emotion at her voice: fear, desire, anger. He pushes it down.

"No, Scully, I was just - " he searches the room for something concrete to name. "Just watching TV."

"Oh."

He waits then for her to go on, to tell him why she's calling in the middle of the night. It can't be because she's thinking about him the way he's thinking about her. Can it? No.

"Is something wrong?" He wants to know.

Her response is hasty. "No, no, nothing's wrong. It's just that I realised that -- what I mean is, I didn't have a chance to say thank you. I didn't thank you."

And there it is. For one stunning breath he hates her with the full force of his being. It is lightning hitting a pool of water, all flash and steam. Then it's gone, leaving a dull burn which might be tenderness in its wake. Her generosity will be his undoing.

"Self-preservation, Scully. I just don't want to have to break in a new partner."

Her small huff of a laugh causes the corners of his mouth to curl. There's nothing else he can think to say. So he stands in his living room breathing into the mouthpiece, listening to her breathing on the other end, in tandem. He can almost see the little oxygen bubbles floating up into the air.

Finally, she says, "I should let you go. It's late." Her voice is soft and he feels it in that aching place in his chest. "Goodnight, Mulder."

"Don't let the bedbugs bite."

The fish undulate softly behind glass.

"It seems like you were acting very territorial," she had said.

"Of course I was," he had responded.

Not the case, he thinks now. You. You're mine. They gave you to me and I'm not giving you back. I don't quite know what to do with you, but I'm not giving you back.

*

In the morning, he finds an envelope on his desk with his name in her hand. When did he learn to recognise her voice on the telephone, her writing? Slitting the envelope, he drops the contents into his palm. A dull copper key and a folded note. Curling his fingers around the key, he reads:

Mulder,

So you don't have to break it down next time.

Scully

After reading it twice, he refolds it and pushes it into his pocket. His fingers clench around the key until they cannot feel the difference between it and the flesh of his palm. When he opens his hand, the shape of the metal is embedded into his skin. He will still feel it long after the imprint is gone.


End file.
